Photographers love gear, and packs are an essential part of ensuring our equipment makes it around the world in one piece. Any good camera pack will get your gear from A to B, but in my mind it takes a little more to make a pack great.

Three things I look for to make this distinction are functionality, comfort, and weatherproofing. During recent shoots in the waist-deep powder of Niseko, Japan, hiking the ridge at Taos Ski Valley, and in the humid Caribbean climate of Nevis, I found the F-Stop Tilopa BC pack was exceptional in all three categories.

My first day testing the Tilopa pack was a February day in Niseko, Japan—in full whiteout. I dropped into two-plus feet of powder at the top of Niseko NoSawa, hoping to position myself below the riders set to charge through a birch grove. As I barreled toward the trees, I suddenly dropped into a dip, yard-saled, flipped a few times, and found myself digging toward the surface.

(Full disclosure, I’m far from the strongest skier on the BLISTER roster.)

Embarrassment aside, I was worried about my gear. But after a quick inspection, I saw that it was fine. No snow got in the pack, and everything was in place, thanks to the Tilopa’s well-designed Internal Camera Unit (ICU) and the stabilizing waist and shoulder straps, which kept the bag secure during my aerial display.

This bag and I were off to a good start.

The F-Stop Tilopa with Large ICU (click to enlarge).

F-Stop’s packs, including the Tilopa, are divided into two parts: the outer shell with its handy features (which I’ll discuss more below), and the ICU, the self-contained insert for stashing cameras, lenses, etc. The ICUs are available in a number of sizes, which allows some flexibility in how much space is dedicated to camera gear and how much is dedicated to other items. (By the way, F-Stop has an incredibly helpful website that displays dozens of possible configurations and provides a very good sense of what will and won’t fit in this bag: F-Stop Tilopa BC.)

Although I always use the large ICU that came with the Tilopa, filling it with camera gear, this is still a very versatile pack for someone who might have only a small amount of camera equipment and wants to haul other gear into the backcountry. Compression straps also make it easy to adjust the depth for things like airline carry-on size restrictions.